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“All right, professor, why don’t you enlighten us?” Jilo said, but there was no real rancor in her words. It must have been very good scotch.
“No. I don’t want to color Mercy’s perceptions. I’m going to let her do all the enlightening today.” He made quite a show of moving his elemental markers over to the diagram, placing earth and fire at the lower part of the pentagram and air and water at its hands. “And now for ‘spirit,’ or perhaps, more correctly, ‘power.’?” He motioned for me to join him, and I went and stood at the head of the star.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t understand any of this.” I started to step away, but his hand shot out and held me in place.
“Don’t move. Don’t tell yourself what you don’t know. Now, Mother, would you stand next to Mercy, right outside the pentagram?” Jilo shuffled her way into the diagram, keeping a wary eye on Oliver the entire time. “Thank you,” he said as he stepped outside the chalk lines and pulled a metal bowl and a short stick from his satchel. I shook my head and started to speak, but his look stopped me dead. I acquiesced.
“What in the hell are you up to?” Jilo asked.
Oliver responded by hitting the side of the bowl with a part of the stick that was covered with felt. The bowl rang out as clear as a bell. “This,” he said, using his palm to stop the ringing, “is a singing bowl.”
“Mm-hmm,” Jilo hummed, “sho it is.”
Oliver sat down cross-legged on the floor, taking the bowl onto his flattened right palm. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, straightening his spine, and then he struck the padded portion of the mallet against the bowl a second time. This time, he contracted his hand and curved it, causing the sound to change. He started to rock the bowl gently between the heel of his palm and fingertips. The sound modulated, higher, lower, the ringing actually quite lovely and calming. I relaxed into the sound, which was exactly when Oliver smiled.
“That’s right,” he said, striking the bowl again. “Listen. Try to detect where the sound begins and ends.” He struck the bowl again and again, a rhythm building itself from the repetition. The ringing washed in and out, and I both heard and felt the vibrations. They layered over each other, growing wider and deeper, forming a wave that carried me away. I could no longer sense a beginning. I could no longer perceive an end. Oliver’s body began to sway, and before I knew it, I felt my own body weaving in the air that moved to make space for me. My breath slid in and out in time with the reverberations.
I no longer heard anything except the bowl, but Oliver must have somehow communicated with Jilo, because she opened the Ball jar, and the flames floated out to land in my outstretched hand. Then nothing existed but the chiming and the light. They merged together and flowed as one, and the Tree of Life that Oliver had etched in chalk entered into the realm of my awareness again, glowing and singing to me. I realized this sigil was not merely a drawing, not merely a diagram. It represented a two-dimensional expression of something so very vibrant and large that it could not possibly fit into our world. I watched as the lines folded up on themselves, an autonomous origami bending into dimensions far beyond any I had ever imagined or experienced. The circles began to overlap one another, linking together into the most perfect sphere, tinted the same haint blue as Jilo’s chamber. I hovered in blackness next to it—becoming the blackness. “What is this place?” I said aloud to no one. The globe spun at a maddening pace as images leapt out to me. Epochs and moments and every single possibility that each contained.
The scent of Maisie’s perfume hit me again, and my thoughts turned to her. Something was in my left hand. I looked down and realized the burnt earth had somehow been placed there. Liquid flowed over the earth, causing it to filter through my fingers. Thoughts of Maisie consumed me, and the flame in my other hand grew into a sun, the earth into a mountain, the liquid into a sea, her scent blossoming like a flower where the two met beneath the star’s warm rays. The rotations of the blue sphere began to slow, and it came into greater focus as it condensed into a single door, painted with bright red panels and black stiles and rails. Something brushed up against my leg, and then wove between them, circling in a figure eight. I looked down, amazed to find Jilo’s three-legged cat there with me.
“Schrödinger,” it said, and then wound back off into the darkness. I was puzzled at first by the one-word message, but then I understood. Like the cat in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, Maisie was frozen in a place where the possibilities were limitless. The line had locked her in a state of flux, like some kind of sleeping beauty awaiting rescue. I felt my sister’s presence. The line had encased her in a sense of awe, a sense of wonder—she was lost in a sense of ecstasy very much like what I had felt when the power of the line first settled on me. The ringing lessened. The sphere began to dim, and then it unfolded, circle by circle, line by line. I stood again in Jilo’s chamber, the Tree of Life now nothing more than a chalk drawing beneath my feet. Oliver was knocking back scotch straight from the bottle.
“You did it,” he said, his face flushed. “You opened the Akashic records, kid. The universal knowledge of every event that ever has occurred and ever will occur in all of its squiggly and mutable glory. You got a peek into God’s very own diary.” Another swig. “I’d always heard the right witch could.”
“Wait,” I said, trying to clear my head. “You’ve never done anything like this before?”
“Of course not,” he said with a sad smile curling his lips. “The records won’t open for just anyone. I’ve never met a witch for whom they would. I knew it, though. I knew if anyone could access them, it would be you.” We had used the rest of Maisie’s flames in this experiment. What if it hadn’t paid off? I halfway wanted to throttle him, and I more than halfway expected Jilo to beat me to the punch, but when I turned to look at her, what I saw surprised me.
She was trembling, her eyes focused on something far away. I crossed over to her and took her hand. She jerked awake from her reverie, her eyes full of panic and sorrow. “I have seen it now,” she said, her voice soft. “I have done wrong. I have worked evil in this world,” her words called out to ears other than mine, begging for absolution. “You have to go. You both have to go,” she said, waving her arms, shooing us away like noisome children. Haint blue burst like a bubble around us, and in an instant Jilo and her world had gone, leaving Oliver and me standing in our own garden. Oliver was still clutching the bottle of scotch. As he took another swig, the empty Ball jar fell from nowhere and shattered at his feet.
NINE
Iris knelt beside the flowerbed closest to the sundial, making a great show of deadheading flowers that in truth had not even begun to fade and pulling out the sparse weeds that had managed to take root under her vigilant care. The sunhat she wore had belonged to my grandmother, and, combined with the soiled floral-print gardening gloves she had on, it enhanced the more than casual resemblance that old photographs showed she bore to her. My aunt had not been the least surprised by our sudden arrival. “How did it go?” she asked as if we had just returned from a trip to the grocery store. “You can speak freely,” she said, pointing to a large crystal, the biggest rose quartz I’d ever laid eyes on, that had been placed in the flowerbed, apparently as decoration. As she spoke, the quartz gave off a faint glow.
“What’s that?” I asked, drawing cautiously toward it.
“That, my dear,” Oliver said, “is a little charm your Aunt Ellen came up with for us.”
“Okay, but what does it do?”
“It keeps the families from being able to listen in on us, or spy on us with remote viewing. She’s planting one in every room in the house. She’ll join us when she has finished.” We had no definitive proof that we were under surveillance, but when the families convened to discuss managing me and my access to power, they seemed very certain of details none of us had discussed with them. Even conversations to which Emmet, whom Oliver openly suspected of being a spy, hadn’t been privy. “Before you share anything with one of us that you wouldn’t want the families to know, make sure one of the crystals is present and glowing.”
“But won’t the families know we’re blocking them?”
“Of course, Gingersnap, but they sure as hell can’t complain about it, now, can they? They have no right to spy on us, and they sure as hell don’t have the right to spy on you. You are after all an anchor now, aren’t you?”
“Go on, tell me what you have learned,” Iris said.
I looked deeply into her eyes. I knew she was capable of lying. She and Ellen had lied to me about my father with a naturalness and ease that worried me. When you’re lying to protect someone, there’s a certain sense of nobility to it—you know, or think you know, that you’re freeing your loved one from the weight of knowing. I myself understood this from having lied to Peter about Maisie. But I felt a little less noble about it with every other falsehood that had followed.
Lying didn’t come easily to me, which surprised people given the way I’d made my pocket money up until recently. I used to lead tourists around Savannah on the Liar’s Tour, making up lies about famous people and places. The fun of the tour came from the fact that everyone knew I was making the stories up. True deception was a different matter. My aunts had much more talent in that arena. They had lied both actively and through omission about knowing the identity of my father. They claimed to have done this to protect Maisie and me. And together, with or without Ginny’s coaching, they had concocted the story of how my mother had died at my birth after begging Ellen to use all her power to save me rather than herself. I deeply wanted to believe that their horrible lie about my mother had come from a place of goodwill. Remembering that my mother had seduced both their husbands, I felt a pang. I wanted to believe that Ginny hadn’t left them with a choice, but when my aunts had helped drive my mother away, piety may not have come into play at all.
“She did it,” Oliver said, the glint in his eye showing the great pride he took in my accomplishment.
Frankly I had no idea why what I had done was so special. “I did nothing. I just stood there,” I said.
